To begin the new year, I’m offering here a series of posts on the core practice of the Art of Hosting, the Four-Fold Practice. Since 2003, the Art of Hosting community has been my primary learning and practice community as I have learned and grown my facilitation and leadership practice. Central to that community is the four-fold practice, a simple framework that describes both what the actual Art of Hosting is and what it does.
Part one today describes a bit of my own journey that brought me into contact with this community. Over the next few days, I’ll share a bit more about the practice as well including its origins and my current thinking on its application in both facilitation and leadership.
Part one: just what I needed
I began my journey as a facilitator back in the early 1990s as I ran meetings for the non-profit I worked for, the National Association of Friendship Centres. Across Canada, more than 100 Friendship Centres provide services, cultural programming, and care for urban indigenous communities. Beginning in 1948, it is one of the oldest indigenous community development movements in Canada and has become a powerful force for change and social development.
Facilitation is a very important skill in the Friendship Centre movement because, as an organization that is devoted to community development and the elevation of urban indigenous voices in policymaking and social change, well-hosted meeting are an active part of the work of Friendship Centres. Friendship Centre staff, especially younger staff members, often find themselves in front of a flip chart, armed with markers, writing down ideas and helping groups make sense of the world. The Friendship Centre movement is an excellent training ground for participatory work. SO tat is where I began, in the national office, as a policy analyst, armed with a culture and community development-heavy degree in Native Studies from Trent University and a deep desire to help.
My first facilitation training came from Bruce Elijah, an Oneida Elder who was our Board Elder and spent many days at our office advising us, guiding us with prayer and good advice and making sure we were doing things “right.” One day in 1993, when I was about to go an host a very important meeting on family violence policy development, I asked him for some advice and he gave me an eagle feather to use as a talking piece and said “The Creator gave us two important gifts: circle and story. Use them.”
That was the full extent of my first facilitation training and I put it into practice right away, convening a meeting of Friendship Centre staff and Health Canada officials and researchers that resulted in the establishment of the national Aboriginal Family Violence Initiative. It was clear to me that these two gifts – circle and story – were the secrets to meetings in which participants themselves were in control and the content was uninfluenced by the facilitator. It reminded me that my only role was to be quiet, hold space and keep careful notes.
I think I had an inkling very early on that quality participatory work required something like meditation for personal preparation. It also always required a prayer or some way of deliberately entering the work, with a good heart and an aspiration towards kindness, listening and contributing one’s best thinking. I could see too that people were more engaged when everyone was given a chance to speak, when there was a good process held in place to enable the work and what, at the end of the day, what was created was created by all. I watched the Elders in our movement open meetings with prayers and hold us in ceremony for the duration. Bruce himself would begin Board meetings with a long Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving prayer, which sometimes lasted 20 minutes or more and acknowledged our dependence on things far greater than those on the agenda. We would sometimes smudge the room, to bring kindness and calm to the space. Sometimes we would sing together or someone would sing for us and after this extended beginning, we would start our meetings. The Elders would sit quietly with us, and intervene only if saw something that threatened the quality of the space in a negative way. They didn’t suppress dissent or disagreement, but they called people to account for their behaviours and invited a pause for everyone to remember the bigger teachings and get back to work.
Those were my first teachers in facilitation work: Bruce Elijah, Sylvia Maracle, Marge White, George Cook, William Commanda, Gisda’wa and many other Elders in communities across Canada who opened our meetings with prayers and guidance and who stayed present during the whole time. These names are well known across indigenous communities in Canada. When you are in a meeting hosted by them, you are in ceremony, plain and simple. They make no distinction between the two. When people are gathered to do work, it is a sacred moment with the potential for healing and significant change. One never knows the long term outcomes of an important meeting, so attention to the quality of the space is critical. In retrospect, I can remember the exact birth moments of significant things like the Aboriginal Head Start Program, the devolution of the Friendship Centre Program, the Aboriginal Family Violence Program, the Tsawassen Accord, and the BC First Nations Leadership Council among others. All were meetings that began in prayer, with that deep level of intention.
Mostly my job in these meetings was to design and run the process by which work got done, but it was always critical to do that in line with the quality of the space that Elders had created. I made many mistakes when my own ego or sense of self-importance trampled on what the elders had given us, and I paid for those moments with some embarrassing public scolding from Elders! These moments were some of the most important parts of my facilitation education – being called on the floor and corrected in front of groups of people, always directly, always with kindness, always with the intention of restoring and remaining in relationship.
In 1995 Caitlin and I decided on a whim to travel to Whistler, BC, for the International Association of Public Participation Practitioners conference (it was known as IAP3 back in those days). One of the sponsors of that gathering was BC Hydro, who had been using a large group facilitation method called “Open Space Technology” in their work. Chris Carter, who was working in change management with BC Hydro at the time, hosted the open space day alongside Anne Stadler and Angeles Arrien. In retrospect, that is quite a team, and it was a brilliant opening, which included some aspects of ceremony such as lighting a candle in the centre of the rings of concentric circles holding 400 of us in the Whistler Convention Centre. We were all offered a chance to call sessions and record the results of the sessions in a newsroom filled with a bank of 20 386 PCs running WordPerfect. After their opening, the conference exploded. Into dozens of topics and sessions – I led one on the role of storytelling in facilitation – and after I had witnessed a whole day of this I knew that there was a way to host large group meetings that ensured that the responsibility for the experience was owned by the participants.
For many years afterwards in my work with the BC Association of Friendship Centres and later, the Federal Treaty Negotiations Office and the BC Assembly of First Nations and Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services, I used Open Space whenever I could. We ran meetings on economic development, firearms legislation, the implementation of Aboriginal title, family rights in the child welfare system, policy research conferences, youth network development, organizational change, governance, stakeholder consultations…you name it. If you were in a meeting with me in the early 2000s, you were probably in an Open Space.
Through my work with Open Space Technology, I met Harrison Owen, initially in 1997 at a one day course on self-organization and then later at a gathering in 2003 on Whidbey Island, where he was the key feature in a four-day conference called “The Practice of Peace” based on his little book of the same name. This gathering brought together folks from around the world working on peace and reconciliation as well as those of us who were working with Open Space and other large group methodologies. It was there that I met Toke Møller as well as Juanita Brown. At the conclusion of that conference, Toke and I found ourselves in a circle with a dozen or so other people, already tightly connected through relationships. We passed a talking piece amongst us discussing the question of what comes next following this conference. When it came to Toke who was sitting next to me, he spoke of the trainings he was starting to do around the Art of Hosting, and he said something like this, which I later asked him to rewrite as a poem:
It is Time
the training time is over
for those of us who can hear the call
of the heart and the times
my real soul work
has begun on the next level
for me at leastcourage is
to do what calls me
but I may be afraid ofwe need to work together
in a very deep sense
to open and hold spaces
fields
spheres of energy
in which our imagination
and other people’s
transformation can occurnone of us can do it alone
the warriors of joy are gathering
to find each other
to train together
to do some good work
from the heart with no attachment
and throw it
in the riverno religion, no cult, no politics
just flow with life itself as it
unfolds in the now…what is my Work?
what is our Work?
And I said yes to that invitation.
It has been thirty years since 14 women were killed at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, and every year I mark their passing here.
I’ve always associated this song with that event, and I’ve even asked Lynn Miles about it, and she has said to me, despite her introduction in the above video, “yeah, I guess it’s also about that.”
And let’s remember their names and what they were studying or working on that day because they were our peers and their deaths marked a whole generation of us.
- Geneviève Bergeron, 21, was a second year scholarship student in civil engineering.
- Hélène Colgan, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and planned to take her Master’s degree.
- Nathalie Croteau, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering.
- Barbara Daigneault, 22, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and held a teaching assistantship.
- Anne-Marie Edward, 21, was a first year student in chemical engineering.
- Maud Haviernick, 29, was a second year student in engineering materials, a branch of metallurgy, and a graduate in environmental design.
- Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31, was a second year nursing student.
- Maryse Laganière, 25, worked in the budget department of the Polytechnique.
- Maryse Leclair, 23, was a fourth year student in engineering materials.
- Anne-Marie Lemay, 27, was a fourth year student in mechanical engineering.
- Sonia Pelletier, 28, was to graduate the next day in mechanical engineering. She was awarded a degree posthumously.
- Michèle Richard, 21, was a second year student in engineering materials.
- Annie St-Arneault, 23, was a mechanical engineering student.
- Annie Turcotte, 20, was a materials engineering student.
Take a moment, and listen to Lynn’s song, a piece that always reminds me of what we lost on December 6 1989 and what work we still have to do.
One of my mantras that helps keep me focused when I’m designing a process is “I’m not planning a meeting, I’m planning a harvest.” This helps me focus on need and purpose and helps me choose or create processes that make good use of our time together.
Facilitators can be guilty of the sin of falling in love with their methods and tools. Especially when we learn a new thing, we are desperate to try it out, sharing our zeal for this fresh thing we’ve discovered. In my own experience, many times that results in the meeting being about my needs and not the needs of the group. If I design a session based solely on the method – even if it is ostensibly in services of outcomes – I can find myself suffering from intentional unawareness and missing what the group wants or needs.
Because I am a process geek and love my tools and methods, I have found it necessary to disrupt the tendency to suggest a structure before fully fleshing out what is needed. This is why I organized the planning tool I use, the chaordic stepping stones, in a way that saves final decisions about structure until the very end of the planning process.
While it is essential to start the design with need and purpose, equally important is having a strong sense of the outputs, or the harvest of a process. In participatory work, outputs are not merely the tangible record and artifacts of the meeting. They are also intangible. Another design principle I use is “leave more community than you found” which demands that whatever we are doing, we build relationships and social connections in a group as much as possible and at the very least do no harm to social relationships. Building relationships is essential if the outputs of group work are to be sustained after the meeting is over.
Keeping these principles straight is aided by this handy framework I helped develop years ago, inspired by Ken Wilber’s integral theory. It recognizes that every meeting produces outputs that are both tangible and intangible, as well as individual and collective.
Harvesting and Collective Sensemaking
Tangible collective outputs include meeting artifacts, such as data, reports, visible shared purpose, decisions action plans, structure and organization, and records of the event. Intangible collective outputs include social relationships, collective learning, and social cohesion.
Tangible individual outputs can be skills, personal takeaways, a clear personal workplan, or a knowledge of one’s role and responsibilities. Intangible individual outputs can include belonging, encouragement, clarity of purpose, enjoyment, and a sense of purpose.
All facilitators spend time working on the tangible collective outputs of a meeting, but sometimes we give the other three quadrants short shrift. If we don’t pay attention to these things, especially the intangible outputs, we can often create good artifacts but at the expense of relationships or trust. How many times have you been a part of the process where the facilitator delivered on the work, but everyone felt worse afterwards? Harvesting needs to be reciprocal, not extractive.
I use this framework by asking my clients to choose two or three desired outputs in each quadrant. These are things we want to happen as a result of the meeting and they become constraints for choosing our tools and designing a flow for the process.
Recently I helped design a meeting process for the First Nations Technology Council to invite First Nations social development managers to come together and work on an investment strategy to improve the use of technology in their work of providing income assistance to individuals in their communities. It would be easy to make this an extractive consultation, but my client was clear that we needed to build community between these people, encourage learning and peer coaching and ensure that going forward the work was supported and stewarded by the participants themselves..
When I came on to the project, we had a good draft agenda that was tailored towards getting information from the participants to include in an investment strategy being prepared for the federal government. But in checking against the intended intangible outputs, we realized that the process was too dependant on the facilitator and presentations from the front of the room. We made some significant changes to build more community, more peer support, and more ownership of the work. These included:
- Changing an environmental scan to a world cafe in which participants shared their stories about their work and the way they were able to provide services in spite of the technological challenges they faced.
- Moving from a sterile user profile process to a peer process in which participants interviewed each other on the steps that each manager goes through in meeting, processing and reporting on income assistance. We made a process timeline and participants coded their work to show where they used technology, where frustration existed in the system and where the process was bottlenecked. These became key points for the investment strategy.
- Instead of the FNTC writing the strategy themselves, each of the five consultations will appoint two participants to be a part of a sense-making group whose job is to review the work of the entire process and design the investment strategy alongside the Technology Council. This group of ten will convene to produce the final product, and hopefully deliver it to Ottawa, preserving the voice of participants in the work.
The meeting took participants by surprise and many were thrilled to be engaged in a participatory way and have their knowledge honoured. Because these people don’t often get a chance to meeting others in the same job, they were hungry for network building and sharing solutions with each other. Supporting this community will be an important part of the work going forward.
Focusing on the harvest in all of its aspects helps to create a set of enabling constraints that helps me to be a better process designer and provide a better overall experience for participants. Give the tool a try and let me know how it changes your practice.
We’ve just completed our 17th annual Art of Hosting here on Bowen Island. For 17 years I have welcomed nearly 1000 people to our home place through more than 50 workshops we have conducted here. I always appreciate seeing the island through the eyes of our visitors. And so, coming fresh off of that experience, I responded today on our community facebook page to a question posed by a long time Islander, Rob Wall: What is “The Bowen Way.”
This was my answer.
It changes over time and with waves of people who come and go. As a person who has been here for 18 years, I’ve been here long enough to see our culture goes through at least one major wave. Of course, I have no idea what it was like before I moved here or how I and others changed it when we came in the early 2000s. Whatever The Bowen Way is, it is both good and bad, positive and negative, visible and invisible. Every small community has its way, and over time, all ways change.
A long time ago I committed to living here for the rest of my life, and that means paying attention to the changes and embracing what is good and helpful, and rejecting what isn’t. And as waves of new people have arrived (more than 30% of our population has turned over in the past five years, and we have lost many elders who have died or cashed out and moved away) new ways emerge. For those of us that have been here for a long time, sometimes those new ways are as confounding as the old ways are to newcomers. As long as I have lived here there have been these kinds of funny tensions and confusions between old-timers and newcomers. If we can have a sense of humour about ourselves, and remember that really nothing makes sense, then it eases the tensions between folks that believe that THEIR way of seeing things is the right way. We’re all guilty at some point of becoming a bit precious about our views of the world.
I have learned that if I can’t embrace change, then I am liable to be encased in suffering as my projections of how things “should be” fall away to be replaced by stuff I don’t understand. I am so grateful for the many “new” people that have arrived here since I have, who have added immeasurably to this place, and also grateful to the “oldtimers” who keep the traditions I love alive and remind me what is uniquely beautiful about our community.
Bowen Island will never perfectly be the place you think it is or want it to be. It will always delight and disappoint you. Like any long term relations, you will fall in and out of love with it, and your view of it will change over time. Stuff you thought was essential to the place will fade away and be replaced with new cool things that you never dreamed of.
The character of a place is always in flux and change, like the seasons and weather, like the cycles of the forests and sea around ourselves, like the people we know and the ones we haven’t met yet. That is is the real Bowen Way, lives that come and go in waves, all linked into a complex mix of friendships, animosities, and surprises, on 20 square miles of rock surrounded by the Salish Sea.
Enjoy the ride. It’s easier that way.
It feels like Christmas Eve around here. I am sitting at home on Bowen Island and our house is full of friends and colleagues Amanda Fenton and Kelly Poirier who have now retired to bed. Along with Caitlin, we have completed a long and productive day of planning and design for what will be the 17th annual Art of Hosting on Bowen Island. This evening I am sitting by my fire, finishing a dram of Laphroaig and remembering the first one in 2003 when Toke Moeller and I sat by this same fireplace discussing teaching and learning and what this practice is really all about.
Back then the Bowen Island gatherings were hosted at Rivendell, a beautiful contemplative retreat centre on a small mountain above the village of Snug Cove on Bowen Island. That first one in 2003 was hosted by Myriam Laberge, Brenda Chaddock, Toke, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony (if I recall correctly) and supported by Marks and Marg McAvity, who we (and still are) stewards of Rivendell. That was the first Art of Hosting for me, and it was really a coming home.
For years I had been working as a facilitator specializing in large group participatory methods and I had a strong sense that there was a leadership practice in the way we hosted Open Space and World Cafe, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Luckily Toke and his partner Monica Nissen and friends Jan Hein Nielsen and Finn Voldtofte and others had done the ahrd thinking and realized that great participatory meeting had four characteristics: people were present, they were all participating, they were being hosted and they were co-creating something. The Danes postulated that increasing these patterns would bring more engagement, more dignity and more emergence in conversations and so they articulated the four-fold practice of theArt of Hosting, which are the four simple touchstones of presence, participation, hosting and co-creation.
In 2003 I came home to this and was invited the next year to come as an alumni and then the following year where I was invited to be on the hosting team . Every year since 2005 I have been pleased to welcome people to our island, known as Nex?wle?lex?wm in the Squamish language, to experience the Art of Hosting. SInce that time I have been privileged to be on nearly 100 hosting teams for Art of Hosting gatherings around the globe in places as diverse and far flung as Japan, South Africa, Estonia, Ireland, Turkey, and all over Canada and the US. I have worked with dozens of stewards of this practice, and thousands of practitioners, learning every day more and more about how to create social processes that truly affirm human dignity, invite folks into all kinds of storywork, and help people listen to each other in a way that makes it easier and maybe a little more possible for them to co-create the futures they need.
A couple of years ago my friend Scott Macklin caught the spirit of our gathering in a short film. It reflects the kind of pace and deep learning that characterizes the Bowen Island gathering, and is a beautiful record of our 2017 team. Have a watch:
So, as I get ready for bed tonight, I’m feeling deep gratitude for my teachers, especially Toke Moeller and Monica Nissen who guided me onto this path of my life’s work, and who have supported me over these 15 years with love and care. And I’m looking forward to meeting these folks that are coming, each of them like a little Christmas gift, full of surprise and delight and curiosity and possibility.